a necessary universal category?

"The term division of labour is a descriptive category belonging to a specifically expropriative and reductive method of looking at the world (a vorstellungsart or pre-patterning of knowledge). It has become a conceptual filtering device deployed as a means for extracting other pieces of information: where the filter ‘division of labour’ is applied to the relation within a particular set of objects, the patterning of both the relation and the means of knowing of the relation is thereby ‘templated’ and this enables the extraction a certain type of information concerning an interrelated specialisation and differentiation from those objects.

...Division of labour becomes yet another invisible term, another immovable piece of furniture amongst so many similar others, that has to be included in every inventory of the human home. This nonnegotiable furniture clutters up and inhibits the discourse of social transformation. To alter Zizek’s comment on freedom: we cannot articulate a critique of our world because we lack the very language to articulate our alienation from it. The language of social transformation has become silted up with bourgeois categories imported into it by the pragmatist ideologies..."

– For different men take joy in different works

Where the seeker after possibility is considered inconceivable, or minimally "romantic", then what I'd call a "possibilist" chases the "impossible" in any other language, and the fantasist (some would call "fanatic" or "futile") is the only real realist when saying "nature doesn't work that way; nothing is that certain". As both empiricism and reason eventually lead to irony (especially when juxtaposed together – that is "comedy", if you'll recall George Carlin), the absurdist becomes the most faithfully consistent, all the while a nihilist without a claim to truth (that doesn't mean a lie). Where madness is the most profound sanity, the only way out is in, and that is an aesthetic move – no doubt often we're pushed, but it's our choice to call it "home" and proceed to rearrange the furniture or cast it out the door for a public barbecue (where folks are not consumed or even on the menu).

Where every individual pursues its own interest, society can then be said to be an expression of interest without a contradiction – it only looks like an agreement, there never was a vote or conciliation – and everything remains experimental, except perhaps the wheel. Where there is at least some interest in each other, then the individual and social soon merge (but really they evaporate – isn't it the endearing which endures? Some say just the opposite: a chain, a weight, the state). What is uninteresting simply does not occur (that the population is flexible, movement's not constrained), and the division of labour disappears because labour itself has gone missing even where there's effort. Some would theorise the population itself would vanish in a battle, but that is a half-empty consideration, and as far as the cup is concerned, meaningless ... unless of course, pragmatic playfulness or good ends unanticipated by any means, are also an impossibility in a mad world. But then the world itself would disappear, and so it's starting to appear beneath the superficial varnish. We might rephrase the question, "who's on top, air or water?" but does it really matter except to gravity, the 'love' of an earth mother? Otherwise the argument's between something and nothing. Up in Iceland's always down if you're from southern Africa. A top is just the middle of a spinning gyroscope.

Of course, when pessimism only expresses doubt toward the success of a particular project or aim or a direction (they say "it's possible but I wouldn't count on it"), that expression could be the most favoured thing toward pushing possibility forward: "perhaps we'll try this time, reverse instead." But they're calculating probability confusing that with truth and then get nasty: everyone has witnessed flukes and know that they can happen – that's the beauty never seen by the omniscient – occasionally there are even breaks from prison, and none would dare to call them "hippy drop outs".

If only peoples' other interests were treated like a favorite color, or a type of apple of one's eye without a moral attachment, interference or even too much thought about it. Like the appropriate color is the one which suits you (that is, you put it on not under orders), even if it's new like taste in need of growing, that's for you to know or find out. The egoist only says "my choice is not your business" unless invited or have a wish to try it. And in this sense it's true: it's sharing which makes a communist in old Eutopia, and battle's for those stingy kunts who try to knock you off your feet to stay in line, insisting you be democrat or take your shit without a "by your leave" or any other consideration.

Even in Eutopia property and its acquisition is possible, but where's the fun unless it's shared and then that universal category, proper disappears, unless you're all alone and so malnourished, but then who is there to say "who cares?" And then you're finished. There's never been a society of hermits in a cave. That would be a monastery or house of monetary slaves counting on miracle inventions and saving up their days for someone else's spending, and then repeating "I was framed!"

The Free-Trade Association in Old Eutopia

Not to imply a history, we're only talking myth-time, but before the fifteen fifties, trade was an association with "where one was seen" or want to tread or travel, from the notion of a way or manner of life, when that meant "to motivate", not "strife". Like thrift was just an image of things when thriving, not like "striving". Before the tit or tat exchange there was the occupation, and that was just tradition, not in means appropriation.

A trade route (double positive) was the path partaken and on some more examination, seen to be repeated or worn smooth but with good reason, if only timely season or a pleasant iteration. Just like maidenhood's the time of day when Venus (middle sister of the Moirai) is sky high, and not corrupted hymen or "no copula today", not 'til you can menstruate, then sold as proper slave, which comes in modern times to post-progressive graduates. But Morning Star at birth and Evening's set shine like chimes to younger sheep, or so it seems to be that way when they frolic and play – the rest is for siesta after mother's white fiesta's flowing like the milky way.

Before commiserating mercenaries who's slaughters help the markets, commerce was the co-mercy found at a common commissary and commissars did not command from any royal court or fort nor gift of reprimand, resembled rural courtesy, said "libations all around!" and poured some port to each who might just have hit upon dry ground. There would be, on similar occasion, a reciprocation in reverse, in no wise a debt or due. Reciprocation's just a living poetical device of alternating mimicry, more like dada than an auto payment. A golden rule's unneeded when one notices surroundings: "what goes around comes around, no worries mate".

In the way of metaphor seeking after similarities one finds differences which might become long-time familiarities. "Marriage" regularity called "custom" (then made law by them who only wanted increased property), were not for wedded folk at all, but arrangements to ensure the kids will learn the stories (lays of leys) peculiar to the land and how to get some help if lost or have a hand-up on a fall, or how to grow a seed by watching beetles roll shit-balls, what to expect and when – like growing things like waxing moons and when some owls hoot it's time to move your home. We still call them "old wives tales", thinking a "withered hag or crone", to which she answers, looking of a sudden quite voluptuous "aren't we superstitious, mister high and mighty of opinion! No wonder you feel all alone when sucking after minions!"

Conscious & Subconscious Material

is first of all, not the matter with this issue (maybe nothing is). Nor is it always a cause or material witness, but may be a product, in the sense of multiplication under and over the table. Thinkologists lave long looked to discover specific inner motivations, trapped as they were in the "childish" question "why?", the only word which to many delivers "knowledge" as a psychological state deemed a step above the "common sense" of experience and in fact, justifyies authority, most importantly, their own. Criminologists feel quite at home in this camp, especially since response to stimuli has become passé in the least and at most completely discredited, just when they were making headway with the idea of free association beyond the notion of complicity with guilty parties.

But what thinking person, or child for that matter (or more correctly, issue) would ask the 'why' question unless suspecting something foul or fishy with the affirmation given, not to mention endless, regimented ultimatums? I'm with Poe on this incorporeal matter when he discussed the imp of the perverse. That is the inner genie proficient in outer possibility – its chief question is "why the hell not?" – and lets you know there's always an alternative, even to consistency [a systematization of beliefs is never necessarily true; that is the confusion of what is with what the calculus can do (Wittgenstein)].

Ulterior motives are said to be secret and therefore, interior as well, often acting out without our awareness til after the fact – hence, ubiquitous guilt. Atheists who believe this is a function of nature or physis and not contingent on a generalised social fucktitude (nomos) are revealed to be abject christians after all. The theory is that these "drives" are ultimate or primary. In this sense they resemble gods and politicians with inner demons (or outer puppeteers) imbued with the dark magic of evil forces not ill-resembling some parents. Youth, even in Plato's day were prone to be heard to say, at least under their collective breath, "fuck you!" The literary romantics were first to formulate this into an axiom of nature: "Out of the mouths of babes comes the wisdom of the ages". To this day it is thought by some there resides, even in the elderly, an inner child which must be nurtured to achieve happiness. Freud called it the Id, a collective of recognised possibilities which might come to fruition as desire. More likely, it seems, comes interest for contemplation, particularly for those trained from an early age to suppress or whittle down their wishes. Without the imposed dialectic between thinking and doing by permit-granting institutions (permissive is not here the operant word), participation is added to the mix.

A secret wish is said to be incriminating if it does not arise from duty or responsibility. Desire is less incriminating if it entails a sacrifice or attempts to contribute to others' profits or pleasure. Most folks are not so single-minded and that is not generally considered a fault or lack, since the overly obsessive so often come across as anal fools on a collision course with absurdity. When facing uncertainty as to which desire is to be fulfilled or direction taken, economists have invented the cost-benefit ratio. It is the logic of utility wedded to a payoff. In an earlier day, important decisions were left to a toss of the dice – they called it "divination" – should the albatross or osprey not appear signifying land was nowhere near – they'd call that "reading the auspices". Without certainty, one must take a chance, and Socrates himself said certainty may be the biggest of the social fabrications. Who knows what the gods have in mind? There was also a time when such a question was taken neither literally nor figuratively, but then, it was an age of poet heroes more concerned with good Loki or Fortuna than debt collection or seeking a reward, as then as many heroes fucked shit up as saved the day, and that was to be expected (or so the Tricksters say).

Today, rationality is derived from economic calculations (and proved by a luck in the draw) to materialise a fortune. An educated guess usually indicates insider trading. It's not quite the same as the proficiency of a skilled carpenter or mechanic well familiar with certain tricks of their trade. Kirk once asked Scotty if he'd always exaggerated the time factor for his repairs, to which the engineer replied "How else could I be known as a miracle worker?" Some calculation is often invaluable to avoid falling into the abyss or out of space, but it is the near misses which provide the highest educational opportunity. Otherwise it's just all rote, and where's the consciousness in that?

In the vortex which swallowed Zeus dwell youth and their smart-as spontaneity, applying "play" says "downfall" to a higher-than society

The criticism of the sophists was directed against the entire tradition on which Greek society was based, and principally against the moral conceptions which hitherto had been unquestioned: good and evil, right and wrong. The criticism was essentially negative; that which hitherto had been imagined as absolute was demonstrated to be relative, and the relative was identified with the invalid. Thus they could not help running up against the popular ideas of the gods, and treating them in the same way. A leading part was here played by the sophistic distinction between nomos and physis, Law and Nature, i.e. that which is based on human convention, and that which is founded on the nature of things. The sophists could not help seeing that the whole public worship and the ideas associated with it belonged to the former – to the domain of “the law.” Not only did the worship and the conceptions of the gods vary from place to place in the hundreds of small independent communities into which Hellas was divided – a fact which the sophists had special opportunity of observing when travelling from town to town to teach; but it was even officially admitted that the whole ritual – which, popularly speaking, was almost identical with religion – was based on convention. If a Greek was asked why a god was to be worshipped in such and such a way, generally the only answer was: because it is the law of the State (or the convention; the word nomos expresses both things). Hence it followed in principle that religion came under the domain of “the law,” being consequently the work of man; and hence again the obvious conclusion, according to sophistic reasoning, was that it was nothing but human imagination, and that there was no physis, no reality, behind it at all. In the case of the naturalists, it was the positive foundation of their system, their conception of nature as a whole, that led them to criticise the popular belief. Hence their criticism was in the main only directed against those particular ideas in the popular belief which were at variance with the results of their investigations. To be sure, the sophists were not above making use of the results of natural science in their criticism of the popular belief; it was their general aim to impart the highest education of their time, and of a liberal education natural science formed a rather important part. But their starting-point was quite different from that of the naturalists. Their whole interest was concentrated on man as a member of the community, and it was from consideration of this relation that they were brought into collision with the established religion. Hence their attack was far more dangerous than that of the naturalists; no longer was it directed against details, it laid bare the psychological basis itself of popular belief and clearly revealed its unstable character. Their criticism was fundamental and central, not casual and circumstantial.

From a purely practical point of view also, the criticism of the sophists was far more dangerous than that of the old philosophers. They were not theorists themselves, but practitioners; their business was to impart the higher education to the more mature youth. It was therefore part of their profession to disseminate their views not by means of learned professional writings, but by the persuasive eloquence of oral discourse. And in their criticism of the existing state of things they did not start with special results which only science could prove, and the correctness of which the layman need not recognise; they operated with facts and principles known and acknowledged by everybody. It is not to be wondered at that such efforts evoked a vigorous reaction on the part of established society, the more so as in any case the result of sophistic criticism – though not consciously its object – was to liquefy the moral principles on which the social order was based.

– A. B. Drachmann, 1922 Atheism In Pagan Antiquity

A few big wars to save an ancient structural integrity (and winning!), the golden age of Greece was rendered to obscurity, and even Macedonia died in a generation – all roads then were leading to Rome, a former Trojan outpost. It's now a global infestation since the Spanish inquisition and Merlin led revolt against Mab's enchanted 'kingdom' just in time for statehood and the bourgeois revolution. But heaven's fall was never even threatened till kids found gothic punk grown up on top of some old funk from a former generation.

Could it be that ethereal fourth dimension is home to the juxtaposition of Buckminster-Fuller's "synergy" (neither worker nor a boss can produce a home t.v., that feat belong to the factory!) with Thomas' & Thomas' theorem that the consequences of an illusion attain to it reality? Then the death of gods is proved with Merlin's final dictum, "I turn my back on thee!" bringing on modernism, and the old polysynergy collapsed in a puff of blue magic with little consequence except to steadfast believers who would as soon die where they stand as move to the side of statistical infrequency. With what do we replace the corpses given the theory of a vacuum of power attending the king's assassination? Simple: the birth of possibility as a case of spontaneous generation: physis 3; nomos zip. A real vacuum would suck power into nothing. I would imagine Merlin's incantation would work as well on political executives and other corporate sops – they're not, after all, gods! ... that distinction belongs to cops.

Today the bigheads still buy the spin of folk as mob, as mindless mechanism prone to idiocrity (or is it mediacity?) believing anything. But other than the steadfast few, everyone knew all along it was safer to appear swayed by official talking points (or elsewise called P.R.), to "act as if" than contradict officially obtained wisdoms, that is, until the death of poetry (encrypted pantomime) and only the word was given, when philosophers and playwrights were thereafter thought creative and not absconders of general tendencies already well afloat, or taking others' gut feelings and making of them rhetoric (education once was just a public entertainment).

A cop by any other name's a stalwart magistrate, a burly priest, a set of ungood habits – no gut to ever get it but employed in censorship. A play by Euripides was well received only when it resonated with an audience – the authorities be damned. Had it not we'd have never known that Sisyphus-king was just a moron, but the gods, a cruel joke. And hemlock's for impiety, free thinking gets the yoke or in this gentle day and age, you're set to making license plates and die alone and broke. Hans Christian Andersen full well understood that public thinking's insufficient: to make the higher archy sink takes total disinvestment, or resounding off the walls a proclamatory "Bullshit!"

The subtraction of gender from Eutopia

As said on occasion, "two things the female can do the male cannot is have and then feed children", but apparently, that is not self-sufficient, even in Eutopia, where the lady-folk can change sparkplugs as quickly as gents and without consideration for making cents, there is still a need for an invested deposit with interest. As a result, Eutopian children are the one difference calculated by addition rather than subtraction and without regard to any cancellation of zeros, making them the only difference which makes a difference and more, no matter how little of the furry future they're actually alloted. Were one to count orphans as such, we could truly proclaim a unified theory grand with distinction that is expressing a gut feeling mutually attractive, at least for the moment.

In our own foreign land, moments are scarce or tediously drawn out: the war is on going between synthetical genders in pursuit of congenial gentrification disguised as a "harmless" contract negotiation but with unwanted carry-overs made safe in the pen. There is nothing gentle about this genre until the gendarmes & generals are slammed against the barn at birth, a euphemic ex-posure for kidnapping an illegal adoption, aborting all distinction in the proliferation of difference and an end to all subtraction as a means to growth, where belonging is no longer a sexual question (or its economy) but equally baudy, taking life as they may in lieu of corpses or unwanted scarification. Such is thought overly-idealistic.

Even warfaring Athenians built statues of youth, to this day ill-conceived as pornography, despite the attribution of pagan idolatry. Sans one, another or any combination of parent, orphans and bastards must be parthenogenetic like gods stripped of power and canceled in the ratio. Take away increase and growth loses only the dimension of quantification. After all quality is no product of measurement and therefore under no orders from the competition. Hence the common nostalgia for superiority, ever mistook for a species, of payment as a hostile synthesis between iou and yom, unaware that bad is never genetically transcribed like crooked books and that is the reason every birth is a blank slate in need of no repentance of origin and obliged to none for giving, since innocence can be no more synonym of naiveté.

– see Ernestine G. D'Bordeaux, Theses on the Copula

Ode to Sacrifice in the Cave & on Iceberg

We donned our sacred face, a comic mask to honour the serious and melancholic nature of the business. Honour: the word is meant to hone our appreciation of any matter so deemed worthy of dusting with red ochre, the colour of the life-bringing fluid. Grandpa said he was tired of the place, too fast was the pace, "Help take me to the cave of my brother, 'Old Bear', so he can partake of my sinews and hair, or chew old broke bones for a taste of the marrow before he too curls up for the coming long winter".

Back to the warm cavish womb, my father he escorted. Quick was his ending and the bear was engorged. We fleetfoots went north when the weather enwarmed, no cave was in sight and the bears were all white. Grandma needed no help, it was clear, she simply took off one day without gear, to visit her sisters and shed not a tear. But my father near drowned when his boat overturned, it was on dry land but still did demand I take him out to a different boat, one staying upright, endlessly afloat. I put on my clown mask because of tradition, my own face was wet and in need of rendition. We set out to sea and on berg we did hinge. The air it came brisk but he felt not a tinge 'cause "euphoric it feels", and pretty damn quick if you undo your tunic and cold embrace fully: on an empty stomach, the journey is easy.

The visitor under ungoodly pith-hat went home with my tale and proceeded to chat "the savage there eat their own elders in feast or leave them out cold, no care in the least". Like Ulysses so missing Callista's good wisdom, and charm, heard what he wanted, returning full-armed. "'Tis better to go with good books full of law, and disrespect others their savage guffaws. Life it is sacred and managed must be, prolonging a pain 'cause death's worse than some bondage or nothing at all in the void, into nothing, a black and everlasting fall: pulling the plug or loosing the rope's an affront against all, depriving us hope!"

The wolf quite attracted to calves' fetal membranes, was taken away to alleve ranchers' fears for futures exchanges, uncertain they seemed. Now cows, when they grow old must labour and struggle in pain on the ground, bruising the carcuss exceeding men's taste, so're hauled off as garbage uneaten, to the nearest town's waste, the flies there a'making (maggots, a bear's once-favoured cuisine) are sprayed with the poison, to prevent a plague in life's stinking prison, all for the glory, great good of a nation, 'cause nature's allegory – now vacuumed and clean – is a bomb's agitation or else it's a dream.

"Nothing's connected, no fear when extracted", enlightenment's learned, "and pain is the standard", we're ever forewarned. Analogy's fancy for amusing small kids, but oldsters know better: expect only worse and should you survive, the party's then festive – because yer not deader – you never did live. As long as you're fettered, the future's the time when your ship will come in, but too old you'll be then, or weighed down all rigid with all of your things. My son said "Oh well, he tried, he sighed and twitcing for long, lay down surprised. He died only after the doctor was called, who said 'if only the car had not stalled, there might have been hope or a miracle cure, alas, Lady Fortune's an iffy affair. A pill for your nerves with a tonic of gin will let you sleep well, till I'm needed again'."

The rope it has broke, we continue to tumble and roll, but off on a tangent in a cognitive fog in the same position we were formerly towed, 'til we slam into an absurdly placed log, and come to our senses for a brief intuition: "just what was 'indebt' and to whom was it owed?"

Boasian Reification?

"Intellectual truth is a moral sentiment followed by an emotional outburst enforced by a huff and a puff and a blow yer house away."

– Mental Balance

"The object of science is to rediscover the natural articulations of a universe we have carved artificially."

– Henri Bergson

Viewing the world from within the machinist paradigm, there are two basic lenses: the descriptive or structuralist (eg.., anatomy), and the functionalist (eg., physiology) which presents hypotheses of motivation (in both movement and purpose), answering the questions "what is it?" or "what are its parts or connections?" in the first case and "how does it work?" or "what is it for?" ("why") in the second. Confined to this viewing apparatus, the thingness is the thing. Once identified and plotted for future reference, viewers can move on to the next bit of dismemberment for an ultimate reconstruction more real than reality, if only because it is manufactured, no question about it beyond pride of workmanship.

But when everything is nominalised, it has merely been given a name. The anonymous context always precedes its articulation: before speech comes gibberish, just for the hell of it. This is why a hinge like an elbow has the same name as an enunciation – "arthritis of the tongue" should by now be as meaningful an utterance as disjointed thinking. The article is the real deal because it precedes a noun and then qualifies it by definition. Certainty is always an article of faith, which is why poetry, like a wide-angle lens, is identified by the embrace of ambiguity when it opens up the previously occluded context or rejoins what was formerly amputated, but only by implication – the principle of indeterminacy demands it only for the fallen of faith, those who realise an answer must be another question or turning point in that direction.

Predication is just the (or the just) application of syntax ("when?" and "in what order?"). Systems theory focuses on the connections or articulations alone (zones of connection or dissection) as if they are communication events and calls this functionalism, but because we are still within the machine paradigm, answers are confined to some form of pragmatism. "What is it good for?" just begs the questions "what is good?" and "how much?" Most ideas of functionalism still concern teleology, which is both 1) the reason or justification of a device and 2) its direction. In social systems, we have the questions "where are they going?" and "why?" Whether social or material, the answers break down to 1) structural improvement, creation and destruction and 2) "for itself" or "for the other". Pragmatic teleology is always concerned with profit. "No reason" or "It's fun" is considered childish and in need of improvement. Adultish parents are very concerned with progress and development.

Many who choose the organic over the mechanic metaphor have made no choice at all since the organism is still viewed as a machine. They've merely switched majors from engineering to biology within the same institution. Politics and argument (which are two ways of saying "antagonism" to gain a foothold) errupt largely over nothing because no one has actually left the box or switched viewing apparatus. Antagonism is relieved with a negotiated contract or balanced transaction. The refusal to pay results in civil war.

The box is just a large category. The category, Rousseau would tell us, is literally the result of a past contract devised in some ancient forum among its elect or select membership – an "authentic" communication event representing agreement but more often the power of persuasion, arms or do-nothing, blind faith. To be "on the same page" is the notion of agreement or democracy, the foundation of altruism as the morality of goodness, not interest in alterity – the unknown other. This is why democrats and republicans fight over nothing or fail to see that they are the same. Whenever sides are created, war is the end result and in the process, team-mates are continually exchanged. After the great battles, the teams are actually indistinguishable, yet because the names of the sides are retained, like north and south, matriarchy and patriarchy, communist and capitalist, there can be no actual end to the war. Despite the internal flux, the box is ever more rigid. Because of the flux, the viewing apparatus must be continually improved, just like the progressive evolution of surveillance in cities.

The Hunts and Rockefellers went to war over the sequential order of oil, metal (gold and silver) and paper (the first two as a means to the third, which is mightier than the sword), only to be be outdone by the current syntax of oil, plastic and digital ones and zeros in a computer data-base. The supersession required the improvement of the economic telescope. The digital-analog argument is still being waged by adherents of progressive and old-time religion:

Albeit both 'lectric's insertion by plastic,
Vinyl's still better than any cd,
not meaning certificate of any deposit,
the book's still better than what's on tv.

Today we have the text illuminated on a telescreen – we still read from tabulated squares and not on line at all. Wireless is radio and not a telephone. If this isn't turning back the clocks of time in a faux-forward direction, I don't know what it is than the action of forward-backwardness on backward-forwardness in a Fortean hyphenated existence as the most common experience. Time as the centerpiece of talk is itself the fetish, space-time doubly so, resulting in a total lack of movement and nothing travels everywhere – like nothing is free and all stuck-in-the-muds are justified by reverse sophistry: as religious fetish goes, nothing is as scary as time.

Fetish is just another name for religious or emotional attachment, often (even when it is merely a life-long habit), resulting in refusal to explore outside the box or invent a different viewing apparatus (or "god forbid" rely on what is given in the way of original equipment). The words for such would-be adventurers are heretic, fool or madman. There are pills one can take to prevent or cure a wandering mind (or a search for the difference of novelty as opposed to its creation via dissection). Mind-expanding drugs like certain kinds of poetic discourse (or word play as the experimentation with novel metaphors) threaten the integrity of the collective structure. This is why dropping out is always easier than reform or revolution and may have the most dire consequences upon recapture. Psychological survival then depends on nostalgia: "we'll always have Paris". There's also booze.

Reform merely increases the complexity of the structure (by denying the main axiom of thermodynamics, that no container is too big to burst, given enough hot air). Revolution, a more conservative approach, seeks to replace one with a like-structure by reversing its spin.

Who ever really entered a thought
we'd run out of tree or ore before
we'd see a shortage of slickum, but more,
there'd be any lackage to slippery talk?

Communists who would merely re-route the synaptic pathways of material flow confuse revolution and reform based entirely on religious preference – the adherence to archaic or platonic forms despite present circumstances. Such is how republicans are generally depicted from within the democratic factions, and the republicans call democrats communist. Go figure! The only real third way is out, a notion impossibilists cannot tolerate. As the ambiguous terrorist threat (a replacement for barbarians at the gate) is falling out of colloquial favour, we've come full-circle back to the christian, islamic, judaic friction as if "there is no god but our god" – the hypocrisy being that the three deities were extracted from the same body of just-so stories, making the still-ongoing crusades a mere matter of conflicting literary interpretation masquarading as a "racial", er, national debate – pagan refers to an entirely different myth-time. But fitting with Roman imperial tolerance, the embrace of all gods so long as their own are not excluded, the new-age "goddess" is just an aspiring new contender in an old dress trying to join the fracas out to preserve colloquial categories reified during the crusades. The box must not crumble, not at any cost: we must be civilised! It's a fight club, after all!

You might notice, I've not here left the rope-wrung ring of structural-functionalism, a three-dimensional hang-up. This is merely an attempt at ethnography from the lunatic fringe. It was gods, after all, who invented the wall, and it's diffusion has made archaeology the discovery of redundancy by digging up the dirt.

– Next

Stoic Relativity

Some proceed to an emotional outburst on just seeing the word 'relativity' outside of a discourse on speed's contingency with distance and time, but the only alternatives available to logic as well as sophistry are absolutism and nihilism, neither of which say very much at all. Do I go too far? Doesn't a qualified absolutism express the provisional? Is it not equivalently absolute to insist on none of the above, or in fact nothing at all? It may just be that the outburst itself hinges on the fear to leave the constraining certainty of mathematical relationships, turning a blind eye to life itself – hence the sometimes-seen bumper-sticker, "freedom isn't free", tailing drivers immune to hypocrisy, that is, without a care in the world. Then again, there are the considerate and caring who believe that without constraint, the evil seed would sprout and everyone would rape their grandma prior to feasting on her for supper. Wait a minute ... don't we already do that? And you were worried about a few broken windows!

1

They say there is no experiential memory of it, but pain can be a phantom like a missing limb, providing for prevention of repetitive mistakes or protection from them in the fashion of a reminder, talisman or souvenir. Pessimistic impossibilists proclaim that pain and its avoidance is the very source of consciousness. But it is as well akin to the bullshit detector and negative aesthetic – the impetus for nursing a different taste (a transgression of sorts) and that is reminiscent of the altruists' utopic (or not) optimism regarding affinity, bringing an existing disposition toward death or sleep back toward life – pain can be the terror of a liminal break some say necessary for any authentic transcendence to take place, but who hasn't noticed the healing influence of an aesthetic interest – the pleasant perturbation?

But it is overly simplistic to confine pain to the semantic realm we abhorringly call violence – many perturbations with equivalent impact are in fact quite pleasant, but who can hear them under the drone of alarm-clocks or the alarming advance of drones in a timely fashion? Pain has too long been associated with punishment, that authoritarian perturbation which more "humane" sorts attribute to the birth of neurosis and confusion. Equally long has been the consideration that a movement along lines of encouragement or reinforcing contingencies, resembling play rather than performance contingent on pay, is sinful, childish (which it is) or downright illegal – duty is to be the only source of "pleasure". Joy, with equivalent transcendent potential, has been erased from all dictionaries of possibility unless sold by the pharmacist.

2

On the one hand, all of so-called medical science is a condition of magical or wishful thinking. We hope for a speedy recovery after a performance of the proper rites by those "in the know", that is, those owning all the right answers as religious property. But the fluid, in-out juxtaposition of the half-full and half-empty produces no contradiction or dialectical friction or even a swerve to social antagonism. A full glass symbolizes health for both the glass and the drinker. One too many, for some, is a signal just like the point of unconsciousness for a spinning child or whirling dervish directing toward the limits of one's endurance – limits which when stretched embrace uncertainty and the chance of death (or life). Where do we mark on the lexical map the distinction between bravery and acute fool-hardiness? Only the stretching will tell you, if there is maintained room to back off or a "social net" which is like a nurse standing on the sidelines in anticipation. Uncertainty is a good reason for solidarity, another term for density occasionally confused with sovereignty.

Stoicism can generate courage to endure, like parturition is said to be the most painful but is always followed by, not just relief but joy (or its potential). The praise of stoicism (in face of imposed austerity) and punishment for sinning miss two thirds of the equation, intending to eliminate self-defense or prolonged resistance with the simple formula that inflicted pain or its threat will break any iteration. Stoicism can therefore be seen in some sense as resistance itself, despite the odds and contrariwise, a resignation to surrender. In other words, the courage to push through and see what comes out the other end or the alternative valorisation (slash fetish) of pain made virtuous by the phrase "grin and bear it" or "stiff upper lip" and "damn the torpedoes" which almost ensures the permanent situation negating birth or rebirth itself, the abortion or stillbirth as the only iterated survival in a perpetual renewal or eternal return. In such a state, suicide is the only full-term alternative to persistent sado-masochism, as "rebirth" is reserved for the religiously fanatical.

In this day and age, perhaps only a recidivist mother could see the benefit of broken barriers like the pain experienced of old in rites de passage. The best at midwifery and smooth transitions was once the safe ground for transgressive boys avoiding a beating from dear old dad. Such is the difference between an archon and a nurse, as the latter understands the notion of encouraged reinforcement better than any old soldier returning from battle.

3

Like altruism, the stoic stance has been bound semantically to sacrifice, but it needn't be. In fact, every so-called altruistic act can be successfully argued an extension of ego-motivation (the tendency to follow reinforcing contingencies is certainly the function of the "id", and there are a variety of ways environmental feedback can be construed as pleasurable, even assuming Freud's reality principle has set in). On the other hand, and especially within the paradigm of evolution, every egoistic act, by virtue of its success, survival or durability is a priori good for the species should they benefit (or survive) and therefore, an altruistic mechanism irregardless of personal motivation. The only way to enforce the distinction between altruism and egoism is within the moral zone of teleology, which can not only lead to paranoia (an over-emphasis on agency or direction) but has always presented problems for scientists intrigued by intervening variables, which is to say the free-play of chance. Besides, un/sub-conscious and conscious motives need not agree, and how often are consequents inadvertent or result from mistake? Discovery itself (if truly a surprise) is by definition a matter of good fortune. The best laid plans usually only reproduce existing conditions under a new veneer: an arrow and bullet are equally range weapons by comparison to a dagger. The advantage of one over the other is situationally relative and death by either is equally dead.

Perhaps the greatest discovery by William Morris was that war and commerce are substitutable in any sentence, like twins separated at birth. War and ware split when practioners of the universalist religion, Competition, made an incision not unlike a caesarian section which thereafter makes the mother inconsequential and relegated to myth-time or the funeral pyre. How soon we forget that ripe conditions can only give rise to possibility – and then encourage it. They do not make demands. Today the middle is entirely excluded and never the twain shall meet – the similarity between war and ware is just one of those linguistic curiosities separated by the difference which makes a difference. Kinship is out of the question ... by way of adoption doubly so. The tit-for-tat or pigeon-holing semantic theory we today call "clear and distinct argument" (plainspeak) can only function to prevent heresy (psychosis in today's jargon), rendering both new and old lines of thinking inconceivable. Gods are born only when kinship (or history) is rendered irrelevant. Kinship is only revived by kings and parliaments for the transmission of property, and that takes a certain measure of commodification and its "honor-bound" enforcement: duty in every sense of the word.

After much consideration and research, I find I'm not alone suggesting that tit-for-tat or quid pro quo relations were superimposed upon human psychology by civilisation (that is to say "they emerged", to play it safe) during the late Neolithic/Iron age, before and outside of which the exchange paradigm and jurisprudence did not exist, except as statistical flukes, judging by "uncivilised" survivors. The obliquity (which is to say, 97-99%) of human existence ran along just fine (we are, after all, their descendants!) without property and the state or its high priests, the judge and economist preaching the virtues of sacrifice and theft and stoic asceticism should you be the target: like, "stand still so I can shoot you deader, er, exploit you better!"

Maybe we are a new species – Homo economicus – but the diverging point seems to have been the separation of ego and alter, self and other, individual and society by means of successful thuggery and consequent helplessness (the order is irrelevant as the con-man and mark are interdependent in any well-run insurance scam) in an inversion of the normal curve where, in an involuted twist of altruism, the healer is replaced by the assassin ensuring that future selective conditions would not eliminate an elevated status by destroying those conditions as they arise. A kindred word is alienation (and I'm not suggesting the mere ratio of worker and means of production but life itself as commercial transaction). Jurisprudence or political economy (the so-called collective good which is more and more interpreted as corporate gain at the expense of the un-ranked and filed away) ensures that we've become the alien invaders of our own planet. Some call it (the conquest and destruction of planet Earth) a matricide which supersedes any oedipal complex. Only the Nordic myths out-and-out envision a return from survival to life when the gods kill one another, having run out of credit-worthy prey and other consumables.

4

Today resistance is ageless and genderless, increasingly ubiquitous, an expanding impendency. The globe itself seems starting to awaken shaking and wriggling like it's about to be born. Some think it death-throws – a half-empty consideration. Maybe we're only undulating with it, like a chick pecking at the shell. The breakthrough one can witness stretching the passage for chance or risk and therefore life is seen among the unruly, whose altercations with the constrained environment some call violent mayhem and disorder. It is only tearing away the plastic placenta so fresh air can once again fill the lungs. If there are any dialectic oppositions like the ancient cyclical legends portray as flip-flops in the statistical distribution of "normality", it is the reverse of the rapatious extractions we call civil order, the death or impoverishment of earth's beings for the protection of property and its tenders. There is a reason tolerated behaviour is restricted to the "proper": it's easier to confuse war for peace, hero for villain, and in fact, that confusion which some call gullability is what creates them all as the terrifying phantoms they are to any who wake daily to a nightmare or are dropped into it. From the standpoint of the earth itself, the engulfing flames of Surtr could only be seen as the end of the violence of asphalt and concrete and plate-glass windows which block life from emerging from the current toxic sludge nurturing police in gas masks and riot gears, raining polution like the ultimate volcano blocking out the sun for three consecutive years.

"There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin spells out in Theses on the Philosophy of History. It is terrifying to face the wreckage of history that constitutes the present. One loses count of the tragedies. Despair, recoded as “happiness,” runs through every aspect of social life, increasingly reflected by Hollywood and ironic television sitcoms as if to anesthetize us.

The arguments for orderly, passive demonstrations by Hedges and other liberal pundits miss all this. One doesn’t sweep the floor in a house falling off a cliff. In a world that feels absolutely hostile and alien, every element of social life acquires a sinister glow. In this light, the black bloc appears as a ray of optimism because it creates an opening that leads through to the other side of despair...

Via the black bloc, we open the space to play with power. We radically reverse its operations on our bodies. Casting off the assumption that our bodies need to be protected, that we should give them over to the care of the state, we collectively re-inscribe them as as source of power. We also reverse the notion that freedom ends at the boundaries of individuals. I want you to put me at risk: in this axiom, we find the basis of love, friendship, and death, the three irreducible risks of life.

The black bloc is the site for a new sentimental education: a political reordering of our sentiments. We learn new sensations of love, friendship, and death through the matrix of collective confrontation. In the obscurity of the black mask, I am most present in the world. This unfamiliar way of being compels me to focus and intensify my senses, to be radically present in my body and my environment."

– I.E.F. On behalf of the Unruly

I will tell you another tale from Myth-time: Once upon a time mothers loved their children (and vice versa) and no one questioned what that meant nor felt obliged toward reimbursement – back when it was less clear to children as to the distinction of mother, matrix, middle and the periphery we infer with the preface, "meta-", and that's what really mattered in "love, friendship, and death, the three irreducible risks of life". The security force of Father State is just no substitute.

Personally, I think it's just a matter of Newtonian gravity and personal density: a broad band-width increases the perception of mass as well as its desirability, but density ensures it, regardless of speed or shape of the elliptic. Good nursing can change the world in a generation, once one removes necrotic material, and that will always push the limits of someone's comfort level. I can't say this to just anyone, as many still cling to that in vogue faction of objective material fashion: "It's the economy, stupid!" which is the perfect equivalent of helpless arrogance: "Whatever! ... 's not my problem!". The unruly have always known that stoicism cannot simultaneously refer to courageously stretching limits and self-restrained complacency. The aesthetic is called "thrill" at which youngsters excel: even the elders are starting to see that the rigidly ordered invite it.

– see also The Purpose of Black and Red

Towards Patriarchy in Myth & Legend

THE GODS' CHAMPEEN, PERSEUS & MEDUSA, THE GORGEOUS GORGON:



For the will to power, to purchase and own
With resolute gall, oh he'd have us all swallow
parthenogenetically virgin birth
to cover his own tenacitus girth
or recite "There once were three ladies from Perth..."
Percy [from perthein, “to waste, ravage, sack & destroy”]
incanting his auto-divinity, decapitates leaderless society,
twixt bosom and throat, with a nip & he bellers:
"Girls should be girls cause boys will be fellers!".

– Atka Mip

When confronting homophonic morphs with dialectically opposed semantic reference, etymoligists routinely pick one and announce t'other "origin unknown"., forgetting, and hence, censoring the natural proclivity that aesthetics, like free association, is slanted toward relativity.

MORE GULA POLYPHONY ARE RED WORDS THAN BLACK,
if the color of blood is red and black is when it's dead:

girlish: youthful and vigorous fecundity;
   antonym of sluggish masculinity
ghoulish: morbid, hideous and cruel,
   ghostly in the baddest sense of smell
gaolish: prison-like for the gaelic criminal,
   otherwise the gulag for a spell
gullah: second class citizen confined to poverty;
   guelphling in Canada's bigger city
goulash: archaic pastoralist's meat in a cauldron, (now "stew")
   or an uncoordinated eclectic mixer set to rapid brew.
gules: the red in a riding hood or a Persian rose
gullet: throat, groove or gulch for swallowing meat or stones
   if you are a bad wolf or Roman wearing a Pinocchian nose
gullible: easily tricked or deceived
guilty: red-faced wrongdoing by the gilty,
   a verdict most well to achieve
   on pealing away a thin, if shiny sheen of secrecy

– from The Dictionary

Archaeologists point us to neolithic villages and we are prone to think them permanent settlements (the buildings and gravestones, after all, are), but in all human groups up to citified ones (and even here, it only applies to privileged classes), the village (or neighborhood) is not a container but a node in a shifting or nomadic context. The camp is a portable arrangement but the village is not. This doesn't mean the people don't still come and go on a regular or even irregular basis (see June Helm, Horde, Band & Tribe: Northern Approaches).

Another assumption we make based only on a familiarity with the city, town and state is that the groups themselves are fixed and identifiable in membership rather than demographically shifting, again regularly or irregularly. Regardless of the size of the range or territory, one's home is the range itself rather than a starting point or destination, that is, until one leaves it. This is not to say there is no fond spot one feels most at home, but this is an experiential or aesthetic association and not a measurably tit for tat demographic or a part-to-whole relation.

Then what constitutes the "bearer" of culture and its transmission among the uninstitutionalised or free-moving?

Assuming that most research into neolithic, matrilocal societies is on the right track when it suggests traditions were handed down trans-generationally from grandmothers to mothers and thence to daughters or granddaughters: the females are logically the core of the group or regional ethos or illustrative stories relative to it, particularly when the mother's brother (wherever he now happens to live) is most involved in a young boy (at five or seven)'s training – the avunculate in official jargon. Newly attached (we would call them "married") men then move in and out with the woman's family and the local continuity is intact until something happens which would bring dire militancy and possibly birth the seven-year itch. That is the theory: it should not imply that women were likewise not free to come and go, but they are the cradle and well-spring of the umbilicus or community, at least until they are made to settle down into the permanent relationship – that is always a euphemism for death or infantile disorder.

Among pastoralists the decisions are easier,
as community sheep, goats n' cattle decide the maneuvers.
Like with hunters, navigation's at stake
when the livestock or quarry happen to escape
or the alarm's not in tune, the calendar's off,
and folks fail to wake or get lazy and soft
like in cities where the veggies and meat come to you
all cut and wrapped and packaged with glue.

– from Taste, by Mip

Where men are seen as protectors or providers to the core, and are under attack by encroaching states (directly or indirectly), the coming and going is disturbed, traditional movements are no longer free but contingent on the headway of possibly (and at times probably) hostile others. Bands of friendlies coalesce for defensive purposes; the warriors consolidate; patrilocal residence takes precedence the more involved direct actions become, if only as a tactical maneuver, on the 'lam' or run-in with encroaching law – girls have traditionally gone for bad boys in legally based societies, if only for the chance at travel. Historical Amazons were bands of sisters who kicked ass untill Alexander overran the gullied plains of Scythia. Either way, ecology plays second fiddle to necessity only after mal-nourishment becomes a secondary consideration to self-defense against marauding groups or armies infringing on the home front, which itself may have to move. Unfortunately, patrilocal residence leads to uncertainty all around unless or until residence becomes a permanent confinement, that is, one settles down and flies straight, which is the direction everyone else seems to be going nowhere in a righteous fashion.

What has always been the prime patriarchal concern? The removal of uncertainty with the imposition of linear order (a regimented ligament and then again, religion) and accumulation, a legion of orders so everyone is in the proper position (and stays there) and that is the origin of the evil empire, aka today, the modern, taxing state. When we check our etymology, we find virtue always comes in the shape of a rod, the very instrument suitable for measuring or prodding, poking or beating. Like, someone has to pay for all our new conveniences from Rex and working revolutions as if lady fortune or genderless Rhea wasn't here first, from chaos before Ouranus was kicked by Oedipus Alpha and son, the bad boy Zeus and his rapatious zeal on mount olympus or capital hill.

– see also Blood & Farming

Primitivism & the Organics Market

"For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question"

– Foucalt

Primitivism is simply the adverse tendency toward this sentiment, the live being putting to question the politician's existence, the very discourse that "mere life" is simple, mundane (dirty), uninspiring and best left to the privacy of the kitchen, bedroom and privy while the remainder, public life, is earmarked and reserved for the work-place. Like, is that all there is?

In old Persian kingdoms, Asa was metaphysical truth revealed only to politicians and priests; Druj was the lie bringing on pollution like a corpse or routine menstrual flow as a result of metempsychosis or demon possession. We now know that the social lie is actually the ethic of drudgery and truth is the dogma of donkey's asses and children really do come from the womb and not some sweat-shop producing good for walmart and the college of education like white eggs from the chicken machine in the back room of every safeway but veggie pizzas are still grown on farms...

And Zeus was full of shit thinking he could use his scrotum (or euphamistical "thigh") for that purpose. Of course, authentic primitives, that is, people without a political qualifier or the civil city-containment it refers us to, thought uterine secretion indicated the life-giving agent or maternal source of bio-power itself (a quality of as opposed to over bodies), and not an apalling offering to the corn faction, rendering one's self to shameful positions requiring head-coverings and propertied status – investiture is just the propriety of a proper tie. The moderns know better, as such primitive thinking or "superstition" is said to result in polluted minds – it takes one to know one. But even the gods failed to anticipate the exciting new world of bio-engineering and virtual academia, or broad-spectrum adenectomy, the institutional preclusive to constitutional demons by extracting not just the glands counter-receptive to bullshit, but all the rest as well – it's more than just for organ transplants and other commodity markets:

"The university discourse is enunciated from the position of "neutral" Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real (say, in the case of pedagogical knowledge, the "raw, uncultivated child"), turning it into the subject ($). The "truth" of the university discourse, hidden beneath the bar, of course, is power, i.e. the Master-Signifier: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things.

What one should avoid here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. "Production" (the fourth term in the matrix of discourses) does not stand simply for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its "indivisible remainder," for the excess which resists being included in the discursive network, i.e. for what the discourse itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart.

...The key point is here that the expert rule of "biopolitics" is grounded in and conditioned by the crisis of investiture; this crisis generated the "post-metaphysical" survivalist stance of the Last Men, which ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow."

– Slavoj Zizek

Matriarchy???

Of course, the real problem is not to be found in any gendered prefix, a mere qualifier of an otherwise stable entity or process, but in the root itself which in this case is the unqualified arch. Back when arch and vault were synonyms of the heavens and not the cover for a tit-for-tat proposition, when folks said "The sky is falling!" they were speaking of snow and the impending onset of winter. Little did they know the protracted global severity which was to follow, even into warmer climes, and that is when the word came to refer to the dick who captained the boat.

So much myth and legend from the West, which means as well "almost by definition" – it is that colloquialised – suggests that the patriarchs emerged in an effort to end matriarchal society. That is, it was a reactionary defense mechanism by the repressed or gelded menfolk who only wanted to raise their own children uncorrupted by guilish female influence: the girls. Even if womb envy is considered a motive force, in fact one anthropologist thinks the mess started with the sex strike by the lady-folk to exert control over the bigger boys, then we should expect the iron age machismiocracy would occur as chthonic, in situ or autonomous uprising (an erection of sorts) from region to region in the form of spontaneous revolution wherever matriarchy prevailed in a very Morgan-Marxesque predictable or tit-for-tat linear progression.

But our own well-coloured histories don't even suggest this. For the most part, the so-called matrifocal neolithic cultures were annihilated not from within but from without, in every case by already formed patriarchal states. No military empire spreads for altruistic motives of liberation – no matter the rationalisations (discrediting excuses representing the immorality of barbarians) given to the folks back home like "they hate us for our freedom, those godless heathen, necrophilic baby-eaters". In fact, it was St. Francis Scott Free, D.O.O.M. (Druidic Order of Marianettes), inventor of colostoscopy who first replied "look in the mirror, asshole!"

I wouldn't say matriarchy has never occured. That would be sexist or misogynist itself suggesting women are incapable of being thugs, in the same way that the blame is placed on alien intervention whenever there is an unexpected archaeological find demonstrating "advanced know-how" among stone age cultures, is ethnocentric at least and misanthropic at most.

Two things the female can do the male cannot is have and then feed children. Once patriarchs like Zeus and Apollo discovered milk-goats, they proposed the theory that the mother is merely a vessel, like a flower pot in which he plants his seed. Of course, the analogies here and throughout western mythology more specifically refer to the taking of boy children from their mother's influence to be initiated into the doctrines of patriarchy, and then sending the girl-brides away from home, essentially to live with the husbands father. It is the same tactic the catholics used when they sent Indian children to missionary boarding schools limiting communication with the folks back home, inclusive of beatings for native linguistic usage. In a sense, we still do this when we send our kids to school (or so-called "care center"), at an ever-earlier age, whereupon they must learn a new language or be cast out with the garbage. Educators today call it "slipping through the cracks in the floor of opportunity".

Even so, matriarchal centralisation would be difficult to acheive in the neolithic cultures we refer to as civilised (Minoan Crete, for example). There is no evidence of police or military. No fortifications. No sign that the priestess held any power like we would ascribe to a hollywood "Indian chief" or historical king. What hollywood labels Queen, going back to Shakespeare and Edmond Spencer, was very often the imposed metaphor on what in the oral traditions (myths and legends or ballads) were called "hostess". In the Ozarks, they would be called "grannies". In the Ewe language of Ghana, they are appropriately called "Dada" – 'mother, nurse, or elder woman' – while grandma would be "mama". The Greeks called them "Herophiles" when referring to the ancients or foreigners still living in the hinterlands – we call them priestess or queen because, after all, who could live without politics and religion and the institutions or sacraments on which they lie?

But this "myth-time" predated marriage and herophilia pertained not to entrapment (aka, the marriage bond or shackle) but free love expressed toward strapping young adventurers. When a hero comes to a permanent stand-still, he is a retiree. There is a reason the snake or vine slithering up a magic wand still gives rise to sexual inuendo more than any pharmaceutical intervention into ones health or lack thereof. The Ozark "Granny" is no reference to age but disposition, particularly in healing wisdom – some girls are just born to it. Likewise, "Crone" may derive from the matrix of Chronus, the dyonesian-like Titan who castrated the regal-grown patriarch with a scythe (a gift from his mother) in ambush (and not the greek god, "Father Time-Piece" who enjoyed a similar fate, and is about to again).

While grandmothers may become tyrranical old bitches, few pay it any mind, but it is always thought unbecoming in a nurse (in any sense). Just like being a dick-head generally grants no man a position of authority; on the contrary they are perceived as assholes and counterfucked as soon as conditions permit. It is power which grants authority, and that is why the powerful are almost always dicks. We've merely got the formula backwards, thinking the reinforcement is the cause of behaviour rather than its nurturing. As Dora Marsden said, civilisation rests on gunpowder (spears, in an earlier day):

Justice and civilisation – abstractions both at best – are not two things but one. Civilisation is rather related to Justice as a special case. It is Justice in limited and secondary application. Basic Justice is coincident with gunpowder.

The maenaides of Greek/Trojan fame could be literally taken as man aids (just as men have been portrayed as props or pillars in more than just the phallic sense – the omphalos or nexus is gender-neutral as everyone has a navel): they were described as "nurses" in early transliterations (which is what Homer did, put oral tradition(al) ballads into writtten verse). If we look to German, we see a historical tie between doctors and daughters, and the medieval term, leech, for healer derives not from the sucking aquatic creature later applied to infections but to the suck itself. A look to Spanish gives another different association or sequence, and that points to milk (leche). The wormy, sucking thing gets its name only after the fact, that being the nurturing process common to all mammals. The fe in female is itself a referent to succor and carry. It is the same fe in fecund and fertility and fare and ferry, meaning to carry like the mutual relation or symbiosis of a snake or vine and a staff (the symbol Mercury stole from the maenaides and Persian pairi and then lost to the american medical association of mainly manly doctors). And now we're back to nurturing, from which we get our common sense of nursing outside the limits of a performance duty as slave to master. But there is also a little fe in fury, which is said to be what happens when you fuck with the ladyfolk. The Greek Furries were three feminine "witches", possibly manifestations of the Wyrd Sisters, who took revenge or festerings upon overzealous patriarchs guilty of felicide, the killing of a cat.

The whole other idea behind feminine guile as the art of seduction, certainly resting behind an anti-archist moral sensibility reacting against subliminal cooptation or even educational programming, making seduction itself a "bad" thing (so even Baudrillard said), an expression or desire for power and authority, may itself rest on the patriarchal institution of marriage, a gift from Egyptian PR men to the goat herders of Greece who, without it, were just too unruly to be proper subjects. Without the association with power, who could complain of seduction? I should think I'd be flattered to be seduced! Amoral seduction is just a personal invitation to party, announced or expressed with as much cosmetic flourish as is necessary to draw the attention, where a wink may run further than any mascara, with nary a thought toward massacre. (Body art is itself no necessary signal or demonstration of anything beyond the expression of a personal or social aesthetic: to imply a transmission, it must stand out lest one is reduced to invisibility.)

Without the bind of oath and ownership, where is there room to charge "infidelity"? Like feudal fealty or military obligation, marriage is the end of free association, and this is so well understood that even the state, devoid of wit as it is, has had to acknowledge it as "common law" to still get revenue from those who choose to stay together, where the aesthetic cosmetic – giving us the slogan "love is bling", er, "blind" – does not wear off quite so readily as one would expect. Without intrusion by the cash register and state, polyamory has been the standard fete.

Crete is known also as the place of the palaces. Pallas itself was said a goddess but means more literally "little maiden" related to pallake "concubine," a consortium outside institutional bounds. It was Persian patriarchs who changed the connection to "beautiful women seducing pious men", detourning their own namesake (peri < Paraika) after the discovery of marriage as institutional subduction and foundation for morality. If we are at all to retain the word "power" in an anarchist or even biological context, it can only refer to mobility and its metabolic maintenance. There is a reason there were no fortifications or armouries or mass graves (necropoli) found on Minoan Crete: they were mobile navigators who got out before the volcano blew. They were not any stage or age (bronze, gold or what-have-you) of civilisation precisely because there were no cities. The Island itself was not a city of palaces, it housed them and they were only stopping points for a seafairing culture. The palace was an entertainment center, where all sorts of intertwinement were possible, lasting only as long as it takes. Another descriptor for this sort of culture is "potlach", and sex is not the issue at all, even when children are.

– see Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion – by Jane Ellen Harrison, 1912

– see also Raw Materials for a Theory of the YoungBoy: Is or is it not a parody? Isn't everything?

More on the Sinful Trinity

Had Augustine's trinitarian sins been more specified and clear, as say, megalo-manic rape & much massacre, we might have today a better ideaer of just whom the really bad bad-guys were. But like any reasonably adequate poem, probably the very reason it was sold as "ambiguous" and left entirely for judicial review, enforced by the soldiers, the good, proud & few, with the result that the merely clever have inherited the earth, an eye turned away from their militant machinations like a blind watch-maker incanting the always enchanting "Whatever!". We must now ask, "who was really the sociopath...the soldier, the cop or their marketing entrepreneuer?"

• Fornicate, from fornic for 'arch' or for 'vault', a euphamism for a brothel in Roman times because underneath the arch is where one could get hooked up. There is also Fornax, Latin for furnace, a constellation in the southern skies (and even in China, The White Tiger of the West and not its anteriorly regioned vagina), referencing heat, hearth and home useful to stellar navigators or the positioning of stelle – or standing stones – and harvesting grain for cooking some scones. In Roman mythology, Fornax was the goddess of hearth and baking. Her festival, the Fornacalia, was celebrated on or near 17 February. Like Autumnal Bach Ho in Vietnam or Bakyo in old Japan, Bacchus, formerly the Greeks' Dionysus, god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy, the protector of those who do not belong to any conventional society and thus symbolizing all that's chaotic, unexpected, risky or free, (and elsewhere Diana or Cynthia in Eurozone forests, if we are to believe Sir James George Fraiser) is Rome's male counterpart running amock behind Saturnalia along with Sinn Féinically Gaelic Bealtaine, Scottish An Cèitean (from which the English derived the name Satan on analogy with saturn, planetary patron of the Nordic fire-starter, Surtr and his mutterspell kin) – but it's really the midpoint in the Sun's progress between the spring equinox and summer solstice – May day – which frightens the squeamish captains of industry and official regalia even to this day with its threatening strikes and/or spreading flames inviting not even what ever or for, but "let's do it again and again and then more".


• Idolitrate, from Greek, eidos – a 'form' or 'shape'. Consider the near isophony (same sound or proxima) of idol with ideal, 'a strict point of dogma', then the even greater sin and isophonism, idle - Old English for 'empty' or 'worthless' now meaning 'languid, relaxed or lazy'. Concerning the tripartite sin or sinning, the festive party is two thirds of the problem. Self-defense is the other for some. Bacchanalian maenaides regarded nothing as impious or criminal and their own popularity made them a threat to the Senate's authority. They "were allegedly characterized by maniacal dancing to the sound of loud music and cymbals crashing", rock & rollers one and all. Not much has changed but the back beat and call: superstitious, fractitious and up against the wall.


• Bloodshed is pretty self-explanatory, but the point at which it is sinful is always context-sensitive, the context being whether or no one is violently acting with or against institutionalised dogmatic forms (the gods) or the worthless, lazy and dis-ordered who leave only chance, pleasure and season to guide them. But if it looks good and is pleasant or succoring, how is tailing the object of one's eye a yielding to seduction or defending it a wantan destruction, as long as there's an option: change course with new winds, or rewrite the chorus and not get the bends?. How soon we forget that it was Zeus who first with slick-talk and trickery seduced Semele nee Selenee, moon-godess, earth-mother of young Dionesy and not for a moment or two visa-versee.

  Lore related to many moon stations is one of the most interesting aspects of Asian Ethnoastronomy. Somewhat similar to Chinese but perhaps even more so, Japanese interpretations of these associations tended to revolve around agricultural needs and animistic views of nature. Unlike many Western myths and traditions, there were few if any perceptions in the myths of "active" god(s) creating or wreaking good or bad on the cosmos and/or humans. Rather, especially in Japan with its Shinto base, gods like the talismanic animals [four constellations] were seen as natural manifestations ... stars and celestial events were signs of change in season, life, politics, et al... perhaps most often portending "bad" but sometimes "good" as well.

  – Sei Shuku: Star Charts and Moon Stations

Someone once said god is just an anagram for good, orderly direction, like the forward travels of a pentecostal penis. The multiple entendres derived from vaults and arches associated with female marine navigators (like Sheherazade) and mathematicians (remembering that Pythagorus' teacher was the school marm and sometime goddess, Arithmetica) sound astounding to patrilineal reckoning and their sidereal sidekicks with science degrees who think their pineal is dead, atrophied.

Some say the first Iron Aged anarchists were actually patriarchists with womb-envy fighting against the matristic and vaulted mothers who femed the arks by plotting the arches of stars, ending down South with a bloody clash called Titanomachy and in the Nordic north, the war between the Aesir and Vanir (for Venus, it seems). It was a particularly difficult task to wean the menfolk from wanting to stand as pillars to the great vaults and arches and consanguineal dreams. Like Atlas, carrying the world on his shoulders, is said to have been feted for punishment for succombing to succcoring seductions in attempting to off the old man's theocrastatistical state. Might it have been that the four pillars (sometimes six or eight, or even twelve in Southwestern Great Kivas) holding up the heavenly vault were only metaphors for metaterranean cultures just like houseposts against the godly patriarchs, and why had the Africans painted their ceilings sky blue, even when it wasn't clouding or crowding, and homesick ones invented the blues and the great Mama Wata, Maenaidic Mermaid is still thought of fondly yet witches still burn for unofficial forcasts or talk out of turn, an abnormal rendition to those with no clue?

The Ego and its Sin

In those societies where, for historical/cultural reasons, it is acceptable, even encouraged, to talk about internal states of mind, individual motivations and autobiography, there are many diachronics and these will often take centre stage. It should be noted however that, as they do this, they are not exposing their selves, their individuality, their personhood, their agency, to the harsh light of day. They are doing something quite different; they are telling stories about themselves to others, which should not be mistaken for the complex business of being oneself among others.

– the ego postmodernised as "blob"

We've come to see the world, after centuries, even millennia of repetitious instruction, as composed of in-outies and out-innies (or innies and outies, like the navel but with the connotation that this specific inny is an avant garde or par excellent constituent of generalized "other" innies, outies being those in need of surgical democratisation or disposal) in a multitude of narrative forms: individualist/socialist political discourse; Jungian introspective/extrospective (or "version" there-of) personalities; but rarely do we hear from those (I can think of Arthur Conan-Doyle and Milton Erickson in medicine and hypno-psychology, Samuel Butler, R. Buckminster-Fuller and esoteric zen in metaphysics and certain – who might be considered "post-modern" – biologists) who see the so-called "ego" itself as a nested or recursive, at times tautological community of events and participants:

...Moreover, to the internal continuity of the blob must be added another continuity: that between blobs...the exposed parts of the different blobs are not fully distinct one from another. They are organically united with each other. We are a social species and, as is the case for other social species, the fully isolated Cartesian individual cannot be anything other than what it was for Descartes – a thought experiment. – op cit

If the self is only a referent of the bawdy organism-community, then the "I" is never more than a limited spokesperson or interface to other bodies and not a holder (or hoarder) of power or executive function outside of neurotic circumstances or environmental psychopathy. So much for Mr. Grey Matter and its delusions of grandeur. This would explain the secrecy of most bodily functions and habits like a heartbeat or flow of air or humour to the always serious, often arrogant intellect who is blind to its own whereabouts and what-fores without addressing the coordinates on a map or otherwise instruction manual. Curiosity may be its only virtue.

Stanley Kubrick brought up the idea of in-out-in-out as a bawdy designation for sex between bodies but it also resonates with Buckminster-Fuller's "in-outness" as a quality or attribution of all so-called identities. Clearly it's a behavioural notion rather than a narrative perspective. Rather than a dialectical position of either-orness like a two-step or march or class structure, it is a non-dialectical ambling shifter with no reference to speed. Another word for this is free movement (although it used to be called sloth). It is part of Humberto Maturana's autopoiesis and Butler's inconsequence of the chicken-egg argument. Sequential (or linear) determinism is thrown out the window and the dilemma or paradox or dialectical tension not only relaxes, but disappears entirely. Hegel may have used too much formaldehyde in mummifying Plato & Aristotle and all three became deified.

The project and the process of all institutional logic is religion and its generation of truth, representing the retying of past ligatures just like loose shoe-laces. Of course, belief in the dictums of competing institutions or alternative representations is idolatry (or heresy), extra-institutional sex (unsanctified or unregistered by church & state) is fornication just as the sin of bloodshed is only recognised when outside the avant garde institution of warfare or police action (this is why killer cops always go free or with a merry slap on the wrist to appease the spectating public who expect to see virtue in the authorities who distribute the punishments for everyone else's sins).

The triclycler, Augustine listed "carnal" or organic pleasure, pride (from the self-acknowledgment or inward rumination of outward or others' encouragements – and I should think necessary to give any sort of thanks), and "unnatural" curiosity as triangulating upon every possible transgression. These were the big three motivating forces of the big three sins (idolatry, fornication and bloodshed) which seemed to suffice for peaceful congregations who encountered too much trouble with the initial ten, till the theocracy got back on its feet, when these were later expanded to seven^[1], which is also a pretty easy number to remember.

This shift is the beginning of thought crime, where motive (or intent) is the proof of the pudding and the act is only a cosmetic detail. In other words, if no conspiracy with the imp of the perverse can be established, payment is unjustified (or at least reduced).

The first u.s. patriot act, in a reasonable evolution of rational discourse from the seven deadly sins through the already omnibus criminal code, was twelve-hundred pages long, a mere appendix taking up about as much computer space as a complete dictionary of the english language. Obviously today, there is no escape from sin and no counter-virtue^[2]. Government has gone post-modern in the recognition of the irreality of both rights and morality, the very two invented notions (neologisms) which gave them a leg up in the first place: their own property rights and the appeal or petition (prayer) for charitable mercy or regress of chastisement upon a proper demonstration of one's own chastity.

Virtue turned out to be a big joke on the calculators of morality who produced jurisprudence, the juxtaposition of the virtues of justice (the balance of sacrifice and theft as well as crime and punishment) and prudence (the stingy management of resources which covers charity or taxes and chastening or austerity). The modern word is "political economy" which effectively combines all seven christian virtues, the other four accompanying justice and prudence being temperance, the restraint from ones desires; love, the pacifist or self-sacrificing stance toward whatever harm might come your way; the related courage, endurance without complaint through pain or deprivation; faith which accepts orders without question and finally hope, the amnesia of the past and disregard of the present in the preferential preparation for the future (progress, debt &/or death).

The beauty (from the point of view for statecraft) of the seven deadly sins (and all modern legislation) is that they can be seen to apply to anything anyone does: they are virtues of the powerful and sins of the wicked (the weak). The meek, on the other hand, have the proper airs required of citizenship in any kingdom: cowed, showing a bovine submissiveness and lack of initiative or will. This is also called self-control, an effective invisibility cloak disregarded by police. And if they do become collaterally damaged, no one will care. No one (of any importance) has ever believed in natural virtue when it comes to humans – it must be indoctrinated, in every sense of the word. Naughty children are the proof of the pudding smeared all over their faces, walls, tables etc., another vicious cycle of political discourse just inviting a slap in the face (or ass, as pertains the current rate of exchange) lest one spend life in humility and debt – "not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run", to quote Mark Twain.

Politics, ‘the science and art of government,’ has little or nothing to do with the anti-politics of liberating life from the control complex.

– The Maximal Attack on the Totality, John Moore

[1]: One is perfectly appropos to confuse clerks and clerics, as both measure distance from the norm or standard (set value) and hand out a comparable bill of trade, the incurred (to beat a dying dog with a willow branch for the crime of meandering or bending like a snake or river away from the master's intentions) debt in any transaction or wager with receipt on payment, in either or all, pence, penance or penitentitude. Latin 'salic' meant willow (the tree which also gave us aspirin or salicilic acid) and became saligia or "sin". The one punishes the other after the axiom, "It takes one to know one": it takes a contrary to cure or kill a contrary, thus justifying all uses of state power.

The seven sins are superbia (pride), Accidia (sloth), Luxuria (lust), Invidia (envy), Gula (gluttony), Ira (wrath) and Avaritia (greed), spelling Saligia for mneumonic effect. The latinized words are revealing. Notice the sins are feminine in gender or personification, illustrating the association by Salic Law (forbidding matrilineal inheritance) of guild (old Norse for a community of shared interests), guile (a presumed female trait, once related to "agility" as in "nimble" or "in the act", agon, which only an impotent patriarch would find agonizing, confusing ingenuity with in-geniality), gild, (a reference to the matrilineal/matrilocal neolithic or so-called Bronze age ended by the iron-wielding gods in their clash with the Titans, specifically with the institution of marriage as a property arrangement) and gluttony, referencing a special distaste for the Epicureans who promoted taste itself and thereafter, on approval, enjoyment. Quality, chance or risk, passion and abundance are equally transgressive lines of thought. It appears Mark Twain was right when he cited soap, education and hypocrisy the three virtues of civilisation and chiefly responsible for most massacres.

[2]: Synonym for manliness or rod-like, "virtue" was always just a drilled or purchased (provisionally "inalienable", not indigenously rooted) right, otherwise a rite (ritual) exercised to avoid or deliver punishment, well after "righteous" had been divorced from the more matronly, even child-like gift-giving by "wrong-doing", an archaic rip-off creating all modern senses of moral economy restricted to "trade", a word once meaning trample, crush, flatten, press, stomp & squash, still alive and well in the phrase "I've been wronged!".

Poetic License = Free Association:

nefarious, adj
evil: utterly immoral or wicked
[Early 17th century. < Latin nefarius < nefas "sin" < ne "not" + fas "divine law"]

– from the dictionary

Literally, "illegal" in Latin, but elsewhere and before sinful pissing, nephele was just a cloud or kidney. Figuratively "nephish": like life of the kidneys, full of piss and vinegar ready to burst so consequently afterward dead-like (a cooked fish out of water, and thus, dis-elimen(a)ted or cleaned & deotherized, just like the ever ubiquitous æther).

The dictionary thus fails to illustrate the etymologically hypocritic rendering of energetic life (signified by a healthy kidney-function and the know-how of clouds which piss rain) to crime, sin and punishment, but warns us not to confuse hear and ear or rain and reign (both produced from shadows), just like to, two and too (all referencing a relation between/of one and/to another (in common) position, number and chance resonance or synchronicity):

"Do not confuse the spelling of air, ere, err, and heir, which sound similar. Air is the most common of the four words, as in the air that we breathe, an air of superiority, to air an opinion. Ere is a literary word meaning "before" (as in ere long), err is a verb meaning "make a mistake" (as in to err is human, err on the side of caution), and heir is a noun meaning "legal inheritor" (as in the heir to the throne). "

Yet how often do heirs scarcely manning chest-hairs which procure them the title: "Herr" meisters grow arrogant airs ere err interferes and they come to arrears, mis-hearing the jeers, inferring them cheers from inferiors?

Then, like to be too prodigiously wined thereby prodding officious other's whines, there is:

more.

Machinic & Maginic:

Why are they mining people and continents to the hyper-extent, to the depths seen below? Are they desperate attempts funding building events (with pipelines & parking & prison cements) which I owe, is only to cover a doubtful continuance. A ruse to hide existential incontinence? The fact they've discovered we can no longer indenture (... because there is none) a lucrative future? It's not for a lack of imagination, but its downright banishment and incarceration. Despite the abundance of think tanks and plots, official thinking's subsumed below thoughts. Fortunately, only they are deluded by their prestidigitations; some have even concluded political economy (archaic jurisprudence) is the state of religion – not science after all – a mere mysticism – a means to control. Unfortunately, everyone else still hurts from machinery's magical melancholic curse.

magic. n,

power that makes impossible things happen or gives somebody control over the forces of nature.

a special, mysterious, or inexplicable quality, talent, or skill, usually performed as entertainment

so beautiful or pleasing as to seem supernaturally created [< magus 'big']

machine. n,

a simple device used to overcome resistance at one point by applying force at another point

an organized group of people that controls or directs something, especially a political group

somebody who is efficient but uncreative

a mechanical device used in the theater, especially in classical drama, to create special effects such as the entrance of a supernatural being

a character or factor introduced into a work of literature to produce an effect or to resolve the plot [< L. machina, G. mekhos 'means']

magistrate. n,

a minor law officer or member of a local judiciary with extremely limited powers,

a justice of the peace who deals with traffic violations

the power and authority to administer justice

behaving in an overbearing or dictatorial way

an expert or scholar (formal or archaic)[< master]

Machinating Magistrates devise secret, cunning, or complicated plans and schemes to achieve a goal or to cause harm to others.

imagine. v,

to form an image or idea of somebody or something in the mind

to see or hear something that is not there, or think something that is not true

to suppose or assume something

imagination. n,

ability to visualize: the ability to form images and ideas in the mind,

especially of things never seen or experienced directly

creative part of mind: the part of the mind where ideas, thoughts, and images are formed

resourcefulness: the ability to think of ways of dealing with difficulties or problems

creative act: [< imagin-]

– from the dictionary

– see Darius and the Lions’ Den